As recounted by Freud, Schreber's construction of a delusional solution to the collapse of his masculine identity actually has two distinct elements. At the most obvious paranoiac level, Schreber transforms the threat from within (the fantasy of becoming a woman) into a threat from without--the paranoid belief that he is the victim of a process of unmanning by external powers. Eventually Schreber finds a satisfactory meaning for this victimization. He transforms his humiliation and hostility into at least partial honor and acceptance by identifying his persecutor and castrator as God, by providing a cosmic theological framework and thus higher meaning and purpose for his suffering. However, in extreme psychotic forms of paranoiac delusion, which involve the collapse of the external world and regression to infantile narcissism, a further transformation is accomplished, one that recreates the suffering victim as a messianic savior. The transformation into a woman who can only find her identity as the love-object of a man is restaged as identification with the mother, the primal origin of being who attracts to herself all of the rays of divine libido and gives birth to a new race of men and a new world. For Freud, the story of Schreber exemplifies two interrelated forms of delusional defensive formation against the threat to masculine autonomy: the story of the victim who defines himself as the object of the male ego, and the story of messianic election in which the dissolution of the individual ego becomes the condition for a megalomaniac and apocalyptic fantasy, one in which a new world and a new self are created out of the collapse into nothing. Both stories for Freud are signs of failure--exemples of constructing identities that ignore the real conditions of human finitude and the onerous tasks of achieved autonomy and identity. Demystification of these stories opens up the possibility for a recreation of the struggle for self-mastery and autonomy as an interminable labor of self construction, labor that must take place in the context of a disabused knowledge of the limiting conditions of biological and historical fate.
Freud's view of the Schreber story was a moral tale that allowed him to reconstruct the story of his own identity as not paranoid and not delusional. By working through and understanding the conditions of such a response to the threat of feminization as emasculation, Freud insisted, he had "succeeded where the paranoiac fails." By working through the homosexual investment in his relationship to Fliess, he had succeeded in utilizing and controlling his femininity for the enhancement of his autonomy, for the "enlargement" of his ego. 20 Yet in the concluding paragraphs of his retelling of Schreber's story he wondered, in an ironical but telling fashion, whether his own self-conscious reconstruction of Schreber's narrative might not be as much a fictional and delusional construct as Schreber's. Was the explanatory history of desire into which he had incorporated Schreber's world-construction anything more than another delusional system, parallel to Schreber's own, and thus a parallel defense against his own fears of feminization?:
Schreber's "rays of God" which are made up of a condensation of the sun's rays, of nerve fibres and of spermatazoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and external projection of libidinal cathexes (Besetzungen); and thus lend his delusions a striking similarity with our theory. His belief that the world must come to an end because his ego was attracting all the rays to itself, his anxious concern at a later period, during the process of reconstruction, lest God should sever his ray connection with him --these and many other details of Schreber's delusional formation sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and a fellow specialist to witness that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the contents of Schreber's book, It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. ["PB," 199-200; "PN," 78-9] 21
Freud recognized that Schreber's delusional creation of a private mythology and cosmology, in which gender identity was constructed and provided with meaning by the framing theory of the operation of divine invisible rays operating through nerves, sperm, and blood, was itself a kind of inadvertent parody of his own psychoanalytical framing of the process of gender differentiation through the transformations of libido. For a number of years he and Jung exchanged "Schreberisms," phrases derived from the private language Schreber had constructed to describe his delusional cosmos, in their private correspondence. This jargon humorously paralleled their use of the psychoanalytical jargon which had been created to gain a theoretical distance from, a scientific control of, similar processes of gender differentiation and identity construction.
Recent commentaries on Freud's retelling of the Schreber story indicate that Freud's work, rather than translating delusions into controlled conceptual structures, may have offered something that more nearly resembles a competing fiction or myth about the processes of masculine identification. In his reading of Schreber, Freud chose to omit two elements that played a key role in Schreber's account. First, Schreber's "theory" had clearly paralleled Weininger's in drawing analogies between feminization and transformation into the eternal Jew. But Freud, anxious to avoid the accusation that psychoanalytic theory was less a universal science than a representation of the conflicts of a specifically Jewish experience (especially now, when he was grooming Jung as his Gentile crown prince), narrowed his focus exclusively to the masculinity complex in the text. Second, Schreber's self-constructed messianic myth clearly transformed the negative definition of feminization as emasculation (threatening the collapse of masculine "being") into a positive identification with woman as mother and creator of being. 22 For him, the transformation into a woman was interpreted as a gain rather than a loss. His unmanning was less a loss of being, more the assumption of a new form of being as the primal creative source of both masculine and feminine beings. Schreber's identification with the "feminine" was thus ambivalent: it was not just a taking of the passive feminine position vis-à-vis masculine agency, but a merging with the maternal, originating ground of a world divided by subject/object, passive/active distinctions. These critical elements in stories of the refashioning of masculine identity were not ignored in the more self-consciously fictional stories of masculine identity formation produced by Freud's Austrian contemporaries, Arthur Schnitzler and Robert Musil. Both Schnitzler and Musil were trained as scientists, specifically scientific psychologists; Schnitzler as a medical doctor and psychiatrist in the Vienna Medical School, Musil as an engineer and physicist in the Machian tradition. Unlike Freud, however, they eventually decided that it was fictional narrative and the metaphoric language of art, rather than the analytical case study and the conceptual language of science, which could best portray the kind of self-reflexive narrative of identity construction that Freud described as the distinctive achievement of psychoanalytic science. Inverting the hierarchical distinctions Freud had constructed between art and science in "Dora," they judged the perspective of science as confined to the limiting one-dimensionality of surface phenomena and prone to a conceptual dogmatism (and thus to a recapitulation self-alienating myth ) which crudely fixated the fluid dynamics of lived experience. They turned to experimental, aesthetic, fictional construction as the appropriate form for unveiling the multi-dimensionality of conscious and unconscious mental life, of psychic event and psychic structure, of memory and the present, in stories of self-dissolution and self-formation.
Parallels in the cultural perspectives and the generational, ethnic, social, professional, and educational experiences of Freud and Schnitzler have often been noted, as have the mutual recognition and admiration which prompted Freud to describe Schnitzler as his double (Doppelgänger), and Schnitzler to remark on the way he found himself attracted by Freud's "total being" (gesamtes Wesen) and perceived himself psychologically as Freud's "psychological twin brother." 23 This acknowledged closeness, however, was matched by a mutual distancing and a marked attempt to avoid close social contact. Just as Freud separated his own work from the construction of narrative meaning by the fictional story teller in "Dora," so Schnitzler distanced himself from what he saw as the overly deterministic, schematic theorizing in much psychoanalytic writing. 24 Both saw a tendency toward self-deceptive closure and evasion of self-conscious reflectivity in the work of the other. Yet the parallelism in such mutual critique, often directed more vaguely at a category and genre (the psychoanalyst, the writer or Dichter) than at the person, only seems to make the reputed closeness between Freud and Schnitzler more compelling.
Although Schnitzler's literary reputation in the early twentieth century was built on his short stories and dramas, the full-length novel he published in 1908, The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie), was considered by Schnitzler himself as the culminating work of his literary career up to that moment. In early 1906, two years before the novel's completion, he imagined it as a representative epic of his age, a work that would take its place in the line of great German novels from Wilhelm Meister to Buddenbrooks. 25 His emotional identifications with his characters and his involvement in the depicted situations often became so intense that he experienced great difficulty separating his own existence from his work. Reading parts of it in progress to his wife, he found himself choking back his tears, and when he was finished he noted not only his pride in accomplishment, but also his yearning to "return" to the novel, as if it was his only satisfactory home in a homeless world. 26 This identification with his subject, as in Freud's case studies, emerged from the attempt to work through and master his own experience. Schnitzler's autobiography and recently published diaries reveal remarkable personal analogies between the central plot of the novel and his own affair with Marie Reinhard in 1895-1897. 27 The writing of the novel worked, again like Freud's case studies, as a process of both therapeutic self-understanding and self-construction.
Schnitzler's contemporaries, including close friends and admirers, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Georg Brandes, often appeared less impressed than Schnitzler by the alleged exemplary qualities of the novel, tending to interpret the psychological, social, and philosophical or theoretical dimensions of the novel as not fully integrated, as constituting separable stories which should have remained separate. Schnitzler however, insisted that the connection between the three dimensions was precisely the impetus behind his work. Although The Road into the Open may not be the great modern German, Austrian, or even Viennese novel that Schnitzler had hoped it would be, it does provide an insight into the inner connections between becoming a man, finding a home, and being an artist in Schnitzler's particular version of early Viennese modernism.
The theme or problem of fashioning masculine identity is the most obvious and dominant of the centers around which are constructed the consciousness and existence of the novel's protagonist, the aristocratic, Gentile composer Baron Georg von Wergenthin; his alter ego, the middle-class Jewish writer Heinrich Bermann; and their overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances. Developed as a cyclically arranged series of moments in the narrative of one year of Wergenthin's life, the novel begins shortly after the death of his father and ends shortly after the death of his (illegitimate) son in childbirth. Fatherhood and a version of the father complex are clearly at the center of Schnitzler's conception of the narrative of masculine self-making, and the discovery of the path to masculine autonomy (one of the possible meanings of the novel's title). Virtually every male character is first introduced through a description of the father/son relationship. The generational formation of masculine identity, the passing on of the powers and duties of fatherhood is at issue. Examined through the lens of fatherhood, masculine autonomy is tied to the assumption of responsible freedom, the establishment of a character held in place by obligations and commitments as a reliable and stable center of order in time and space. Emancipation in this context means on the one hand emancipation from the determinations of unmastered desires, from passive surrender of the will to circumstance and the pull of the object of desire, and on the other hand, emancipation from the cul-de-sac of cynical, isolating egoism, in which self-consciousness of the constructed nature of personal identities leads only to directionless drift, to an inability to act out a program for the creation of any substantial identity.
In the opening scene, as Wergenthin muses about his recently deceased father, a memory drifts into his consciousness. A few months before his father's death, he had been involved in a non-committal, self-indulgent love affair with an emancipated American woman (Grace) traveling in Italy. Trying to give aesthetic form to the emotional impressions of this love, he had composed an adagio, swelling with harmonic richness, but ultimately unable to sustain itself for any length due to a lack of systematic structure and clear over-arching melodic narrative. His father had noted this failure of order and direction with a telling question posed as Georg's improvisations on the piano drifted toward aimless dissipation: "Where to? Where to?" (Wohin? Wohin?) 28 The inability to impose a satisfactory order on his experience, to make a commitment to a specific woman as the stable object shaping his sexual desire, to assume a tradition as his own past and to construct a program which would present beginnings and goals, pasts and future in clear narrative outline, the inability to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions and the effect of his self-defined personhood, define Georg's drift in a world where every definition and commitment appears open to constant renegotiation and only the moment and its immediate emotional content has recognizable value. Autonomy of the kind demanded by the father required a self-definition and substantial set of stable commitments which contradicted the open road of anchorless drift which Wergenthin would like to accept as his fate and the open road of infinite possibilities that he would like to avow as his chosen destiny.
In the novel, fathers represent the claims of independence achieved through disciplined responsibility, sustained work, and self-defined social obligation. Wergenthin constantly finds himself counseled to take responsibility for the social and moral consequences of his actions, to both affirm his subjective agency and recognize that his autonomy is regulated and affirmed under moral rules and social conventions. A series of fathers and father res take on the position of enforcing the general law of the father, and thus intrude a voice of conscience and a reminder of transgression and guilt.
Wergenthin's inability to make himself into an adult person, a mature man according to the moral ideal of his real and symbolic fathers, is expressed in the vague guilt that always accompanies the recognition of his transgressions (despite all rationalizations about generational differences, historical change and relative cultural values), and the insistent, repetitious assertiveness of a recent memory trace--the self-indulgent love affair with Grace whose end was also marked by the unexplained suicide of a young painter (Labinski) who had been traveling with them in Italy. While the memory of Grace keeps reappearing as an emotional sign of Wergenthin's faithless, self-indulgent, egoistic use of women as provisional objects of momentary desire, Labinski returns like a ghostly conscience revealing the dark underside (of transgression, disavowed guilt, punishment and death) within his anchorless existence. In a dream near the end of the book, Labinski emerges as the helmsman of Georg's ship of life, the re of death and guilt who steers his rudder. The persistent reappearance of Grace and Labinski in Wergenthin's memories, fantasies, and dreams also reminds the reader that his current affair is a repetitive acting out of an unmastered past which continues to frame Wergenthin's intra-psychic relations in the present. His freedom emerges as a repetitively enacted fate.
The failure of Wergenthin to achieve the kind of masculine identity designated by the personal autonomy and social responsibilities of fatherhood is most dramatically articulated in his relationship to the child whose inception and birth mark the boundaries of the novel's temporal narrative. Wergenthin is unable to commit himself to his offspring, to remember his part in its creation, to prepare or even imagine a home for its arrival, and it's death in childbirth is at least partly recognized as an expression of these failures. The son, Wergenthin allows himself to muse, refused to enter into a world where it would not be loved and sustained, where it could not hope to find a home (WIF, 956; RIO, 295). Wergenthin's transgression and failure as a man lies in his unwillingness to work through his dependent sonship and to assume fatherhood, to take responsibility for the future, to define his identity in a way which would provide a moral framework for the reproduction of future generations.
Schnitzler situates the father/son thematic in Wergenthin's self-formation within a spectrum of analogous pairings in which similar tensions are played out in slightly different ways. Wergenthin's alter ego, Heinrich Bermann, suffers most dramatically under the burden of guilt and the consciousness of having betrayed his father's claims on him. Bermann's father is a former liberal lawyer and patriotic nationalist politician who suffered mental and physical collapse under the pressure of the crushing, disillusioning failure of all of his public hopes. His fall into incurable psychosis occurs at the same time as Wergenthin's father's death and he dies near the end of the novel. Bermann projects his own creative work as a monument to his father's dreams and ideals, but cannot go beyond imagining this monument as a tragicomedy which parodies his father's hopes as empty delusions, and which thus actually repudiates and kills him once again, adding to his sense of guilt. In the more peripheral father/son relationships of the Ehrenbergs, the Staubers, the Rosners, and the Eisslers, the sons range in their responses from violent repudiation to a resigned recognition of their failure to live up to paternal models and paternal claims. But the fathers in Schnitzler's novel are not simple representatives of a former world in which social conventions and roles affirmed secure gender identities and public callings: they already carry the seeds of their son's dilemmas within their own lives and careers. All are marked by disappointments in the public sphere which encourage withdrawal to scientific work, aesthetic enjoyment, domestic relations, or even dreams of exile and new beginnings. The dilemmas of the sons as the elder Dr. Stauber suggests, are only quantitatively rather than qualitatively distinct from the conflicts which the older generation had experienced. Historical change may have made the tasks of achieving autonomous manhood more difficult, its conflicts more extreme, but it cannot absolve the younger generation of the ethical demand to achieve a responsible freedom within the conditions in which they have been thrown by fate. The crises of sonship and fatherhood with which Wergenthin is surrounded are more extreme than his own, both in their repudiations and in their guilt-ridden anxieties, but they mirror back to him in revealing (though often disavowed) forms the patterns of transgression and guilt in his own consciousness and behavior. Only a few sons (all minor characters), like Wergenthin's brother Felician, who tends to assume his adult responsibilities almost as a natural role, or the social radical Leo Golowski, who experiments with future identities by simply ignoring a father who has descended into hopeless impotence, attain even a semblance of resolution. But even they are marked by the general tendency toward escape into ideological utopia, travel or art.
The achievement of masculine identity as an assumption of the role of the father is tied to the disciplining and sublimating of sexual desire in complex ways. In Schnitzler's account of Wergenthin's struggle with his masculinity, the femininity in relation to which his masculinity jockies for definition is tied to the image and role of motherhood. Wergenthin's principle feminine other in the novel, his lover Anna Rosner, who bears his child, emerges as a potential maternal feminine re that could mold his desire toward a responsible, paternal masculinity. From the beginning he experiences her not only as an object of sexual pleasure but as the psychosexual guide that might help him attain a secure consciousness of self within a stable sense of home; a woman who was "better suited than anyone else to counteract his tendency toward frivolousness and carelessness and to spur him on to purposeful and productive activities" (WIF, 53; RIO, 44). 29 It is precisely her much noted tendency to peaceful self-containment and bourgeois domesticity which first attracts him and then occasionally repels him as a restriction on his freedom of self-expression. Her gentle reproaches act in combination with paternal admonitions to impose a feeling of guilt for his failure to take responsibility for his own personal actions and social roles. During a long vacation trip to Italy during the late months of Anna's pregnancy, Wergenthin visits the site in Florence where he had watched his mother die when he was a young boy. As he tries to recreate the earlier bedside scene in his memory he suddenly realizes to his amazement that the word "mother" no longer meant "the long buried woman who had born him; the word meant that other woman who was not a mother yet, but who would be in a few months . . . the mother of the child of whom he was the father. And now the word suddenly sounded as though it intoned something never heard before, never understood, as if accompanied by mysteriously singing bells in the distant future" (WIF, 166; RIO, 148). 30
But the image of the mother also operates in a rather different way in Wergenthin's psychosexual life. It serves as an image of transgressive, irresponsible sexuality, of dangerous surrender to unfettered desire. Just weeks before the birth of Anna's child, Wergenthin indulges in a wild, reckless affair with a married woman. This mystery woman also treats him like a mother, resting her hands on his head as he puts his head in her lap, and listening to and accepting his confessions without censure. However, she is also a maternal re "created for every madness and ecstasy . . . the dark gaze of her eyes, the blue-black stream of her undone hair, the smell of her pale and naked body" (WIF, 236; RIO, 211). 31 Wergenthin's passion also fills him with at least momentary self-confidence and a sense of power fueled by the vague forces of unconscious energies. Yet he returns to Anna and, crying in apparent contrition, lays his head in her lap, an experience that "seemed to him like a vague and sweet dream, as if he lay as a boy at the feet of his mother, and this moment was already a memory, remote and painful, as he was experiencing it" (WIF, 240; RIO, 215). 32
Wergenthin's struggle to define his masculinity in relation to this ambivalent maternal femininity is not offset by a correspondingly serious encounter with the femininity of emancipated younger, non-maternal women. His flirtations in these directions all lead to problematic and unsatisfactory relations with persons who are caught in the same complex problems of self-definition that he is experiencing. In its extreme form, the fate of masculinity in relation to this new, emancipated woman is represented by the tragic relations between Bermann and an unnamed actress who eventually chooses to take her life rather than continue to play the battle of identity as a battle of power and submission between the sexes. This woman is constantly forced to submit to the identities imposed upon her, to exist only as a projection of Bermann's fear of feminization. Although Schnitzler continually reminds the reader that the women in the novel are themselves historical agents struggling with problems of gender and social identity that parallel those of the male protagonists, the male characters never themselves appropriate this understanding and continue to relate to individual women in terms of their own psychological needs and projections. Like Anna, the emancipated young Jewish women--Else Ehrenburg, Sissy Wyner, Therese Golowski--all find themselves placed in positions in which it seems virtually impossible to avoid eventual resignation to the roles and types constructed for them by men. Neither Wergenthin nor Bermann are able to define their own masculinity in relation to the feminine as anything but an other that must be possessed. Just as Bermann refuses to recognize his lover as a responsible agent in her own right, and not just an affirmation of, or threat to, his own identity, so Wergenthin only finds satisfaction with Anna when he can experience her as a refuge in which his wandering finally finds a home after a long journey, as "the only being who completely belonged to him" (zu dem einzigen Wesen, das ihm ganz gehörte), and as a kind of surrogate anchor for his own absent center (WIF, 102; RIO, 90). Neither Wergenthin nor Berman seem able to perceive the women in their lives as individuals caught in the same conflicts as their own, as projects of identity formation which demand both an emancipation from maternal attachments and paternal domination and a free reshaping of the relations between feminine and masculine in their adult identities.
The narrative of masculine self-formation in The Road into the Open does not produce any clear resolution for the major characters. At the novel's end, as Wergenthin abandons Anna to take on a temporary position as a conductor's assistant in a provincial German town, he is right back where he had begun a year earlier. He seeks the illusion of a freedom defined by mobility and lack of commitment and escape from the self-definition and responsibilities of fatherhood. The death of Bermann's lover leaves him as bound to the bitter resentments of being determined in his actions by the identities thrust upon him, and stymied by his inability to forge relations of trust and intimacy, as he had been at the beginning of the novel. But in the telling of this unresolved cyclical story Schnitzler also told a story of its cultural and social contexts, of the conditions which made the ambivalences and apparent failures of his characters understandable.
The social dimension of The Road into the Open has often been perceived as disjointed from the love plot because it seems so completely focused on questions of Jewish identity, a problem which apparently did not directly affect the non-Jewish principals, Georg von Wergenthin and Anna Rosner. Yet it seems clear that Schnitzler situated his story of personal identity adrift within the context of a world of Austrian Jews in a crisis of cultural assimilation, acculturation and exclusion because he perceived the particular issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-identification as exemplary of a larger cultural process. This process determined, even if in less extreme and self-conscious form, the individual lives and the cultural worlds of Wergenthin and Anna as well. Throughout the novel it is clear that the oscillating attraction and repulsion that Wergenthin and Anna experience in their relations to their Jewish friends and acquaintances is indicative of the larger meaning that Schnitzler ascribes to Jewish experience and self-consciousness. The Jewish crisis is both exemplary of a general cultural crisis and an extreme form of that crisis. It can thus serve as an ideal-typical form that clarifies and articulates the determining structures and essential components of the larger cultural world. The particular experience of the dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and cultural identification forces an articulation and thinking through of a general cultural crisis of subjective autonomy and communal identity. In the novel it is the Jews who theorize, politically and philosophically, the meaning of fatherlessness and homelessness, the breakdown of responsible paternal masculinity, the inability to produce oneself objectively in art or society as a solid, essential identity, and the ambivalence of "freedom" in a world without anchors where all are strangers within their own homeland.
At the center of this story of the universalization of Jewishness is the friendship between Wergenthin and Bermann. From the beginning Wergenthin is drawn toward Bermann in part because of a curiosity about the alien and exotic, a desire to "peer into a world that until now had remained foreign to him" (in eine Welt hineinzuschauen, die ihm bisher ziemlich fremd geblieben war [WIF, 80; RIO, 148]). Similarly Bermann seems drawn to Wergenthin in part because he views him as somehow immune from the torturous conflicts of his own self-consciousness as a Jew. Attraction is mixed on both sides with distancing and occasional resentment at either the perceived smugness or hypersensitivity of the other. But Wergenthin does have moments in which he also recognizes himself in the other and envisions the tortured souls of Bermann and his other Jewish acquaintances as the cultural site on which "the future of humanity was preparing itself" (in deren Seelen sich die Zukunft der Menschheit vorbereitete [WIF, 94; RIO, 82]). The elective affinity and disaffinity between Wergenthin and Bermann is given specific objectification in their attempted collaboration on an opera in which Wergenthin was to provide the music to Bermann's story of a hero/son who ultimately shatters in his attempt to take the father's place, to possess the primal object of desire and to inherit the Kingdom, because of his inability to work through the guilt embedded in his fate and unwillingness to construct a life in the context of the death which awaits him. Although Wergenthin and Bermann are both obsessively absorbed with the son's situation, neither can imagine a completion or Third Act for their story, just as their own mutual sympathies never find a satisfactory resolution in a stable, intimate, and loyal friendship.
The relationship between Wergenthin and Bermann as a relationship between insider and outsider, German and Jew, is mirrored from various perspectives in the personal relationships which surround them. Schnitzler follows up many possible ways in which Jewish experiments in identity formation could work as mirrors for a more universal understanding. Anna Rosner, for example, finds herself attracted to two Jewish suitors (prior to the affair with Wergenthin) who appeal to her not only because of their understanding of the problems of constructing a home and a temporal identity (in generational continuity with parents and children) in a world in which such homes and identities are no longer simply natural, but also because the choices they make from within this understanding recognize the need to discipline the autonomy of self-choice with social responsibilities. Although completely apolitical herself, she is drawn to men who define freedom as freedom in solidarity with others, and take up public careers as political leaders. While Wergenthin often runs away from the problematic self-consciousness of relations with Bermann and other Jews to the apparently unproblematic home of Anna's love and acceptance, Anna herself finds protection and consolation from Wergenthin's self-indulgent freedom in the support of Jews who recognize her unjust fate more readily than he does. In fact there is a sense in which Schnitzler does portray a kind of inner sympathy between women and Jews. Both are engaged in a battle for self-definition within a situation in which they can never escape the identities that have been thrust upon them by dominant masculine and/or Christian-German perspectives. Although both Bermann and Stauber have moments in which they assert their commitment to a Nietzschean ideology of self-sufficient self-making, their brave words seem like a spitting into the wind. And the women eventually end their brief experiments in self-making with resigned submission to conventional feminine identities.
Schnitzler constructs his fictional world in such a way that the Gentile and Jewish positions are not presented as binaries, as closure and openness, rootedness and homelessness, etc., but as distorting and illuminating mirrors of each other. Temporal discontinuity and cultural exile envelops the whole society in which the Jews are situated. Wergenthin himself, although a member of a family in the service nobility whose aristocratic credentials reach back four generations, emerges from a rootless "hotel and wandering life" (Hotel und Wandersleben [WIF, 9; RIO, 5]) as a child to a recognition that "he had no intimate relationship to any human being" despite his many acquaintances (daß er zu keinem menschlichen Wesen in engerer Beziehung stand [WIF, 12; RIO, 8]). His homelessness does not carry the intense feelings of exclusion and involuntary identification experienced by the Jews--he wears his clothes with apparent elegant ease and can fit in less self-consciously than Bermann who is always somewhat embarrassingly overdressed or underdressed. But Schnitzler does suggest that appearing awkward and out of place in public is not a problem confined to Jews--as indicated by the descriptions of Anna's brother's attempt to somehow fit in with the Christian nationalist Right. In the dream which Schnitzler uses to portray the conflicts within Wergenthin's psyche, moreover, Wergenthin does appear to himself in the "Jewish" position of being awkwardly underdressed in a formal social gathering. Even among exemplars of a traditional privileged class whose public carriage and sense of self seem most natural--like Felician Wergenthin, or the Hungarian noble Demeter Stanzides--there are moments of social unease and cultural alienation which make participation in the Jewish social circles, exile, or a "hotel and wandering life" seem almost natural for them as well. As outsiders within, as foreigners in their own country, as experiments in self-construction whose emancipation has left them bereft of all natural identities, the Jews articulate the fate of the human. The illusory vision of a Palestinian fatherland parallels the delusions of German nationalists, anti-Semites and socialists, in which the split within the self experienced by all was projected into a division between a homogeneous "us" and an external "them." The problem of defining a homeland which would be neither an ancestral fatherland nor an emotionally exclusive motherland, but a space for the development of responsible freedom within the acceptance of realistic social obligation, was common to all, men and women, Germans and Jews.
Art's task for Schnitzler was to provide concrete shape or objectification, and thus ultimately self-conscious appropriation and understanding, of this human condition of identity dissolution and recreation. Wergenthin the musical composer and Bermann the writer (Dichter) are artists who articulate two critical dimensions of this task. Wergenthin's art lives from the experience of the moment, expressing the experiential, only partly conscious movement of desire freed from conventional social discipline. His peak experiences emerge from moments of surrender to a primordial, maternal sensuality in which conventional identities dissolve and he feels himself as pure potentiality. His characteristic compositions express rather than conquer the undisciplined drift of desire. He is most successful in the genres of the romantic song and in brief, usually improvised, fantasias or tone poems for piano. Even in these genres, however, he is unable to "finish," to round off his creations as completed compositions with an internal structure. Even his most successful songs, Anna notes, tend to "drift" off at the end (verläuft es [WIF, 34; RIO, 27]). The quintet which represents his goal of accomplishing a fully formed and structured work goes nowhere during the course of the novel and becomes a sign of his failed promise, his incorrigible dilettantism, his inability to sustain the kind of disciplined work which would marks the achievement of an adult identity.
Wergenthin becomes self-confidently buoyant with creativity during the moods in which his unconscious feelings suddenly rise to the surface and find brief musical expression. During such moments Wergenthin feels inspired by a mysterious inner necessity, something "incomprehensible" which he simply needed to allow to "go its own way" and he dreams of future projects and endless possibilities (als müßte er nur ein Unbegreifliches geähren lassen [WIF, 56; RIO, 47]). When Wergenthin allows his daydreams, memories, and half-understood desires free reign, he feels fully alive and is ready to turn back the persistent echoes of the paternal conscience which demand that he find a clear direction for his work, complete a fully formed composition, and fulfill his youthful potential.
Bermann seems acutely aware of Wergenthin's strengths and weaknesses as an artist. He recognizes with some envy that in his inspired moments Wergenthin can live in an atmosphere of aesthetic perception and feeling which does not demand the sense of creative accomplishment that comes from a fully articulated work. Bermann himself cannot give himself over to his feelings and moods; he is unable to allow himself the sense of uncontrolled drift and surrender to memories, moods and images in which Wergenthin indulges. Bermann's aesthetic tool is the word, his method, incessant analysis. Everything must be articulated in consciousness, brought to full understanding. His own self-confidence comes from the conviction that he is "able to see into the human soul . . . deep inside, in everyone, honest or dishonest, men, women or children, heathens, Jews, Protestants, even Catholics, nobles and Germans" (WIF, 42; RIO, 34). 33 The defensive and mistrustful position of the cultural outsider is for Bermann a position of superiority. But like Wergenthin's surrender to the unconscious, Bermann's confident analytic self-understanding also produces aesthetic failure. 34 While Wergenthin can never find a systematic or teleological structure which will fully articulate his deeper feelings, Bermann finds that his words can never join together into a satisfying and coherent aesthetic whole.  When he tries to imagine a structure emerging from his method of analytical, self-conscious dissection he envisions a wildly spinning carousel moving upward to the top of a tower before plunging into the abyss (WIF, 48-9, 261, 330; RIO, 40, 235, 296). Understanding does not produce a new meaning or create satisfactory self-conscious identities, but either dissolves everything or, in resigned irony and cynicism, leaves everything as it is. Even if all the lights on the various stories of the inner life were turned on, and the soul completely illuminated, Bermann laments, the self would remain a "mess," without coherence or continuity (sieht's nämlich greulich aus [WIF, 330; RIO, 296]). Ironically it is precisely Bermann's self-conscious, critical, diagnostic, analytical obsessiveness which makes others dismiss his work as that of an outsider who doesn't really understand the actual worlds of the people he is writing about. Bermann himself recognizes that his analysis of half-understood moods, unconscious desires, and secret motives is not therapeutic, and that he therefore cannot really operate as Wergenthin's therapist:
My dear friend, understanding helps nothing. Understanding is a sport like any other. Avery noble sport and a very expensive one.One can squander one's whole soul on it and be left a beggar.  It won't save us from sadness, from disgust or from annihilation. It leads to nothing. It's a blind alley, so to speak. Understanding only means an end. [WIF, 214; RIO, 191] 35
At moments like these, Bermann loses his sense of superiority over Wergenthin and wishes for a "capacity to perceive each experience as new and individual," for the strength to "endure in each moment" as if one stood in a "new world." The impulse to reduce all experience to words, he suggests is just as cowardly, just as morally blind and defensive as Wergenthin's refusal to face the full consequential logic of his surrender to the drift of unconscious desire and to assume self-conscious responsibility for his actions. The "diverse unity" of "life" will only appear in its "wondrous" and "true" form if knowledge can be turned back into feeling, the subjective aggression of analytical understanding into a shared consciousness of participation in and with the other (WIF, 262; RIO, 235-6). 36
Although Schnitzler clearly imagines Wergenthin and Bermann as two variations on modern art, he does not condemn or promote either. His own art lies precisely in presenting the historical situation of their implication in each other. Wergenthin does not finally achieve self-understanding through his relationship to Bermann. After a brief moment in which he recognizes that the death of his child is a consequence of his moral failure in assuming the responsibilities of freedom, he returns to his persistent self-deceiving belief that his only true freedom lies in breaking all social ties and floating along freely on the sea of his moods and desires. Their collaboration on the opera falls apart as Bermann is unable to imagine a resolution of the son's quest for autonomy under the burden of his guilt, and, as Bermann loses the thread of his story, Wergenthin's musical inspirations cease as well. Neither is able to face the reality of the third act in which the freedom of self-construction in an anchorless world would be directly confronted with the moral responsibilities of selfhood and social obligation, in which the son would have to face the consequences of his patricidal and incestuous wishes. The revelation of Wergenthin's inner contradictions does not find its articulate shape in a libretto or in a critical diagnostic case study by Bermann. It emerges through the description of a dream which he cannot fully understand but whose keys are presented to the audience of readers by associations to the contradictory structures of the composer's world as created by the author. It is only within Schnitzler's fictional construction of the structure of psychic and social relations represented by the mutual entanglement of Wergenthin and Bermann, that the differentiated "types" of the novel are seen as internal to the self and to the culture. Bermann and Wergenthin are not so much alternative models from which to choose, as modelings of the mutual implicated polarities which define the cultural space in which stories of identity formation are lived, understood and told.
Despite the many biographical parallels which have led critics to tie Schnitzler's own position in the novel to either that presented by Bermann or Wergenthin, Schnitzler did not simply mirror himself in these characters but constructed himself in their mutual relationship. He defined his modernism as a form of self-critical creativity in which the struggle to produce a satisfactory identity, to create a coherent narrative and a systematic, though provisional "work" from the disjunctions of experience became the story itself. Like Freud, Schnitzler might well have said that by articulating the conditions of the problem he succeeded where his patients (characters) failed. Unlike Wergenthin and Bermann, Schnitzler did complete a systematic work which revealed the consciousness of the modern not as a resolution of the struggle for identity in an essential masculinity, Germanness, Jewishness, or in aesthetic transcendence, but in the recognition of the open-ended processes of interminable identity construction and self-understanding. For Schnitzler the recognition of the other in oneself was the condition of a freedom which did not involve exclusion and repudiation.
But for both Freud and Schnitzler, this critical understanding remains a story of the male and his masculinity, a narrative of the struggle to achieve self-definition which occurs in the force-field between the desire for surrender to the mother and the assumption of responsible fatherhood. From this perspective the construction of femininity as a free act of self-creation remains a contradiction in terms. Schnitzler does imagine both women and Jews as engaged in exemplary struggles to construct new and experimental historical identities, rather than discover essential or natural ones. In order to assume the mantle of responsible autonomy, however, they must work their way through the stereotypical, culturally imposed identities of femininity and Jewishness that have been thrust upon them. The struggle to redefine a masculinity which will not so much repudiate as recognize, accept and master its own femininity, thus becomes, in a sense the true exemplary human story of identity formation and reformation within Schnitzler's world. It is in the story of masculine identity formation that reflective self-understanding can become a generalized cultural critique.
The "confusions" of the teenage protagonist of Robert Musil's novella Confusions of Young Törless (Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), published in 1906 and written at about the same time as The Road into the Open, are most obviously and primarily confusions of self-definition or identity. From the "carriage" of a story of adolescent psychosexual awakening, sado-masochistic homosexual perversion, and boarding school politics, Musil tried to provide a survey of the "landscape" which framed the "structuring of psychic relationships" (Gestaltung von seelischen Zusammenhaengen) in his culture. The particular materials Musil chose for this story, which drew heavily on his own traumatic adolescent experiences in an Austrian military academy during the 1890s, he claimed, were simply a "trick" (eine List) which made it easier for him to highlight, isolate, and simplify essential elements of the problem of self-formation. 37 The narrator characterizes the core of the dilemma fueling Törless's confusions and self-reflections as pertaining to "what is felt to be the character or soul, the outline or timbre [Klangfarbe] of a person, that is to say, that something against which thoughts, decisions and actions appear insignificant, contingent and interchangeable . . . this ultimate, immovable background . . ." 38
At the beginning of the novel Musil describes Törless as having lost this sense of a centered self, of subjective agency shaping perceptions and action in a characteristically individual fashion. But the problem is not that Törless is simply without identity. Rather he experiences himself as defined by an imposed, impersonal and increasingly alien, oppressive identity, through which his way of being who he is seems determined by forces beyond his control. Even in the sixteen-year-old student, the experience of imposed identity is already fairly complex and has at least three dimensions. There is first of all Törless's identity as a son defined within the "unthinking, animal-like tenderness" (mit einter . . . gedankenlosen, tierischen Zärtlichkeit [VZT, 10; "YT," 6]) of his parent's doting concern and the comfortable orderliness and refined, elegant manners of the society of middle class social elites within which the warm nest of the parental home is situated, a society of "people whose lives moved in an orderly way between the office and the family, as though in a transparent and solid structure, a building all of glass and iron" (Menschen, deren Leben sich wie in ienem durchsichtigen und festen Bau von Glas and Eisen geregelt zwischen Bureau und Familie bewegt [VZT, 46; "YT," 50]). Second, at the boarding school, Törless has come under the sway of a model of precocious, rebellious teenage masculinity purveyed by some of his classmates and expressed in typical forms of expressive debauchery and aggressive, though secret, hostility to the hypocritical moral formulas of the "masters." Two of the senior class leaders, Beineberg and Reiting, have become Törless's mentors in the cultivation of this youthful manliness. In the novel's opening scene, a parental leave-taking at the railway station after a brief visit, Törless's father symbolically places his son under the protective care of these upperclassman, surrendering to them the role of masculine role model, much as he has surrendered Törless more generally to the guidance of the schoolmasters for socialization into the moral order of society. This more general or universal discipline constructs the third, most pervasive and oppressive of Törless's borrowed or imposed identities. Returning to the school after his parent's departure, Törless places his feet in the dusty prints of the boy in front of him with the feeling of inexorable fate, of a "stony compulsion that captured his whole life and compressed it into this movement--step by step--along this one line, along this narrow band drawn out through the dust" (VZT, 16; "YT," 13). 39
Tensions among these imposed and passively absorbed identities provide the first openings for Törless's experience of the absence or loss of that individualizing soul which might give shape to his personal character. The move from home to school had resulted in a brief but intense bout of homesickness in which feelings of abandonment, grief and inner longing, feelings which expanded far beyond any attachment for his parents or his actual parental home and became a treasured object in themselves, emerged as the first revelation of a distinctive and personal inner life. During his first years at school, moreover, Törless had developed a close attachment to a cultural outsider, a shy and sensitive young Prince, whose fragile individuality and religious consciousness were so entangled in his historically anachronistic "filigree habitation" (das filigrane Gebäude) of ancient custom and religious faith that they were unable to sustain themselves against the pressures of "the wooden yardstick of rationality" which Törless applied to them (dieser hölzerne Zollstab des Verstandes [VZT, 12; "YT," 8]).
Memories of these moments, hinting at inner depths of experience and alternative modes of being a self, re-emerge in Törless's consciousness because of the unsettling powers of his emerging adolescent sexuality. 40 The structure of psychic relations which frame Törless's existence are unveiled by the dissolving powers of sexual libido. For Törless, the rough and precocious manliness of his schoolfriends does not provide a satisfactory shaping, control or disciplining of these vague, undefined feelings. Instead he is overwhelmed, as if he was falling through a trapdoor in the floor that held up the substantial and transparent relations of the everyday world defined by rational consciousness. While his friends display their teenage masculinity with lascivious comments about the peasant girls in the local village and in their puffed up bravado with the local prostitute, Törless is overcome by fantasies of a shattering, blinding, ego-dissolving sensuality, by "some monstrous sight of which he could not form the slightest notion; something of a terrifying, beast-like sensuality; something that would seize him in its claws and rend him, starting with his eyes . . ." (VZT, 17-18; "YT," 15). 41 While his friends and student mentors use sexual transgression to prove their masculine identities and test the limits of their power and the boundaries of their egos against the social conventions and moral rules of the adult world, as a way of claiming their future place as holders of power in that world, Törless is caught in regressive fantasies which lead him back to a primal childhood memory of total abandonment in an impersonal world, to that moment prior to the formation of any of the subject positions eventually imposed upon him in order to situate him within the world. While his peers test and establish the boundaries of their youthful selves in the world, the power of sensual urges and fantasies exposes Törless to the threatening and exciting experience of a second dimension of existence. By undoing the weak, defenses provided by his inherited identities, his libido leads him into a world of seething , boundary-effacing passion, of enigmatic darkness, of horizonless infinity.
Musil describes the collapse of Törless's passively internalized identities, the dissolution of his ego boundaries and descent into the world of unconscious desire, in gendered terms. Törless' sensual passion seems relatively indifferent to the gender of its object, sliding easily from Bozena, the village prostitute, to Basini, a classmate. Both function as objectifications of desire more than objects of desire. What seems important for Törless is the identification of the object of his lust with visions of degradation, shamelessness, humiliation. What attracts and frightens Törless is the experience of falling through the trapdoor into the underworld where all the ego boundaries of the official daytime world are dissolved. Musil tends to describe the desire for, and identification with, the object of desire in terms of a passive, masochistic femininity. Törless's hallucinations of nighttime abandonment to sensuality and absolute loneliness appear to him as both "the temptation of a woman and of something inhuman" (sie hatte für ihn den Reiz eines Weibes und einer Unmenschlichkeit) and as something which he "experienced as a woman" (er fühlte sie al eine Frau [VZT, 25; "YT," 24). His visits to the village prostitute are described as an "awful rite of self-sacrifice" (grausamer Kultus der Selbstaufopferung [VZT, 30; "YT," 31). His attraction to Basini develops only after Basini falls into a humiliating, degrading dependency on the sadistic whims of Beineberg and Reiting when he is caught stealing money from a student locker. In both cases Törless's obsessions with "total humiliation" and shameless self-abandonment are inextricably, but also at first inexplicably, connected to images and memories of his mother.  This unconscious association only increases his sense of the perversity of his actions, of the transgressive dimension in his surrender to his sexual fantasies (VZT, 32-3; "YT," 34). In one of the episodes with Basini, the sudden emergence of the mother image is quickly repressed as if such thoughts were a "sacrilege" (Lästerung [VZT, 104; "YT," 126]). Yet the holiness, the asexual purity of mothers cannot be sustained.
At the same time, Törless's desire for Basini, as his earlier attraction to the Prince, is imagined in terms of an attraction to a kind of prepubescent, feminine sensual beauty. Basini's facial features are termed "effeminate" (weibisch); his "soft, indolent" body movements (weiche, träge Bewegungen) possess a "coquettish agreeableness" (eine art koketter Liebenswürdigkeiet [VZT, 50; "YT," 98]); and his naked body appears to Törless as the "chaste slender leanness of a young girl" (von einer keuschen, schlanken Magerkeit, wie der eines jungen Mädschens), a body "lacking virtually any trace of male development" (fehlte fast jede Spur männlicher Formen [VZT, 98; "YT," 119). The moment of sensual abandonment to Basini arouses memories of Törless's own childhood longing to be a girl, a longing that "had tingled all over his body and gone racing around on his skin" (sie kitzelte im ganzen Körper und jagte rings unter der Haut umher [VZT, 86; "YT," 103]). For Törless the feminine is not an image of what he wants to overpower and possess as a masculine subject, but an image of what he desires to be, or at least an image of a repressed and essential part of himself to which he must surrender in order to understand what his own individual character might be. Törless's passion is described by Musil as "a flight" (eine Flucht) from the feelings and thoughts with which he had been "innoculated" in the everyday world and which "gave him nothing and oppressed him" (die man ihm einimpfte, all das, was ihm nichts gab und ihn erdrückte [VZT, 30; "YT," 31]). This "flight" is clearly directed regressively toward the mother, and it involves an identification with the feminine as the image of self-dissolution, of shameless abandonment to the power of unconscious desire, of degradation and humiliation. But Törless's "love" for the Prince and Basini also represents a recognition of the bisexual nature of the "soul" which emerges from the maternal womb. The dissolving of his ego defenses under the pressures of sensual desire brings to the fore the repressed feminine "other" of the "stony compulsion" of imposed masculine identities.
The confusions and contradictions in the psychic life of Törless become concrete, become "things" in the world, through his homoerotic relationship to Basini. By transferring his enigmatic, incomprehensible feelings on to Basini, Törless allows his own unconscious desire to emerge as a potential object of analysis and self-knowledge. His "affair" is described as a psychic disorder, a hysterical or even psychotic episode in which internal psychic conflicts are acted out and thus opened to the possibility of conscious understanding. By working through his relation to Basini, Törless comes to understand the distinction between the reality of Basini as a thing in the world and as a re of his desire and sexual fantasy. He learns to control his psychic projections and reappropriate them as elements of himself, distinct from the objective realities of the external world.
During this process of seeking therapeutic understanding, Törless is placed in constant contrast to his two student mentors, Reiting and Beineberg, who are also engaged in turning Basini into an experiment for testing their present and future identities. Although Reiting and Beineberg are "rebels" against the master's rule and trenchant critics of the hypocrisy of conventional values in the adult world, both formulate their conceptions of masculine identity as a refashioning of the public roles of political domination and spiritual control over others. For them Basini represents a weak and contemptible object on which they can practice their method of controlling the irrational for personal power and egoic gain. Unlike Törless they do not recognize themselves in Basini, they do not fall "in love" with him, or identify with his humiliation. They use him as a means to assert their own masculine superiority over his feminine weakness. Their experiments in manipulation and torture aim at refurbishing traditional models of masculinity autonomy as mastery over the feminine other, either as political domination or as spiritual purification.
Reiting and Beineberg are obsessed with their fathers and forefathers. They define their own identities in terms of a fulfillment of paternal claims and historical destinies, and their identities are described by Musil as essentially "modernizations" of inherited identities. Törless in contrast, although he has a father, seems virtually fatherless; or at least his weak and adaptive father appears to make no claims on his future (other then giving him over to the control of school masters and older peers) and thus allows him a relative freedom to engage in the creative task of reformulating the relationship between unconscious desire and individualized character without overpowering historical baggage and guilt. Reiting and Beineberg are thus presented as the primary alternatives of father-oriented masculine identities to Törless's innovative "confusions." Their strategies for dealing with Basini illuminate the particularity of Törless's therapeutic refashioning of himself.
Reiting is the school demagogue who enters into the encounter with Basini with pre-formed political ambitions. Modeling his future on that of a Napoleon-like military officer with "daydreams of coups d'etat and high politics" (Er . . . rechnete mit Staatsstreichen und großer politik [VZT, 40; "YT," 43]), he sees Basini's femininity and humiliating dependency from the standpoint of the manipulative strategies of the ego, as signs of a pathological weakness on which he can build the structures of his own power. Like Freud in his 1914 critique of the ego-oriented heresy of Alfred Adler, Musil interprets this stance as reductive, and, despite its revolutionary political posturings, as ultimately conservative, and perhaps dangerously reactionary. 42 Reiting provides the students who follow his leadership with an escape from their loneliness by creating a group identity formed around the objectification and projection of their inner demons on to the chosen outsider, and an identification of their potent, purified selves with his own person as their leader and father. This strategy not only disavows the reality of the inner psychic conflict, but raises the specter of a dangerous diversion and simplifying reduction of psychic confusion into politically organized mass identity and persecutory purification. Musil's Reiting and Freud's Adler disavow the feminine within themselves in their "masculine protest" against feminization. They thus continue to confuse internal and external conflicts, acting out their internal fantasies in relation to others. In Freud's terminology they reject the reality of the unconscious and build a world from the standpoint of the self-deceiving power of the ego and on the denial of "love."
In 1914 Freud paired Carl Gustav Jung's defection from the critical reflexive truth of psychoanalytic investigation with Adler's heresy, as an equally reductive systematization of the signs of unconscious mental life into a reconration of religious myth and a traditional theological world-view. In Musil's novel Jung's position is played out by Beineberg. Like Freud's Jung, Beineberg approaches the realm that lies beyond the boundaries of rational knowledge with preconceived religious conceptions. From his father he has imbibed a powerful belief in the reality of transcendent spiritual forces infusing and controlling the world of surface phenomena. Törless is attracted to Beineberg because of their common recognition of the two-dimensional nature of reality, but he ultimately rejects Beineberg's claim that the mysterious irrational powers he perceives are signs of a transcendent world of spiritual forces which must be liberated from their corrupt bodily habitations and mobilized to create a purified new world. Beineberg is in competition with Reiting as a self-styled prophet of a new cultural order and leader of youthful rebellion against the masters. He rejects Törless's hesitating and unresolved ruminations about the double nature of psychic experience, rationalizes everything into a dogmatic system of supernatural essences, and trains himself for the imminent cultural collapse which will provide the opportunity for his prophetic religious leadership. Like Freud, Musil regarded such therapies of supra-natural meaning and spiritual integration as both delusional and conventional, as a recycling of old religious intoxicants in new containers. In both cases as well, this stance leads to an opposition to the politics of identity as an appropriate model for human association. In fact, Freud, Schnitzler, and Musil all reject a type of political mobilization which involves a projection of the internal other on to a social group defined as the external other of the communal self. Basini might be construed as the symbolic "Jew" in the Boarding school. Törless separates himself from Beineberg and Reiting in recognizing Basini as the psychic projection of the other in himself, and thus also in seeing the real Basini as a victim of his peers' lack of self-knowledge and their consequent brutal acting out of their own psychic conflicts.
Both Reiting and Beineberg pursue the fulfillment of their father's claims and shore up conventional notions of masculine autonomy as mastery over the feminine other in their rush to resolve identity "confusions" with new therapies of meaning and commitment. By refusing to go along with their leadership, by insisting on thinking through the contradictions of his psychic life, Törless, Musil suggests, is opening up a more innovative path. As Törless works his way out of the crisis of self-dissolution with various experiments at self-understanding and self-construction, he does accept the validity of the existing parental order of law and convention, but only as a crude, contingent framework within which he can find working space to concentrate on the complex formation of his own soul (Seele) or spirit (Geist) as an individual person. Although he can find no rational or empirical grounds for constructing a general theory of "the nature of man" he remains stubbornly convinced that the construction of his identity must proceed from a disabused investigation of the immanent, natural origins of his enigmatic passions and internal confusions. This process of self-construction is guided, first of all, by a principled recognition and acceptance of the irresolvable difference between, on the one hand, the fantasies, dreams and psychic projections which emerge from the never fully comprehensible life of boundary-dissolving passion and desire, and, on the other hand, acts and objects in the "daylight" world of clear boundaries, definitions and individuated identities connected with each other through rationally comprehensible functional and causal relationships. Both worlds are recognized as "real," and any non-repressive, non-illusory sense of subjective individual identity would have to be based on a consciousness of the constantly changing, fluid and porous boundaries between them. This double vision, however, also produces an ironic and detached stance toward the given identities of the apparently substantial and transparent external world, a knowledge that "it could all be otherwise, that there were fine and easily-effaced boundary-lines around each human being" (daß es anders sein kann, daß es feine, leicht verlöschbare Grenzen rings um den Menschen gibt [VZT, 140; "YT," 174]).
Törless must experience, accept, and come to understand the reality of his own "femininity" in order to work out and live a realistic, unrepressive and undogmatic masculine identity. Autonomy based on possession or full mastery is illusory, thus no autonomy at all. Responsibility is not tied to fatherhood, in Schnitzler's sense of accepting the obligations of social interdependence and generational authority, but to the clear, disabused and critical consciousness of responsibility for the individual self. This self must be constructed within the constant and irresolvable tensions between the powers of irrational desire and the necessities of social life.
In Young Törless, the interminable construction of self-identity is tied to processes of self-narration, to the capacity to tell the story of one's own self-formation, to the ability to imagine one's own identity as one experimental, and contingent possibility. Within the novel the attempts to attain clarity about the relationship between conscious rationality and the world of irrational desire and fantasy through philosophical comprehension are rejected as futile. For Törless, Kant is no help in understanding Basini. But Törless does reach a point at the end of the novel where he comes close to articulating his experience in words. He does not construct a synthesis which would make sense of his experience in some "total" or final sense, but produces an account which clarifies and makes intelligible, at least to himself, the dynamic structures which governed the sequence of events that produced the particular person he had become, or is in the process of becoming. Törless's self-clarification occurs as he is confronted with the necessity of explaining his own actions to the schoolmasters. The attempts by the headmaster, chaplain, and mathematics teacher to appropriate his experience within their conventional discourses force Törless to become more precise about his own particular perspective and the appropriate terms needed to describe it. For a brief moment Törless is able to articulate what had been so vague and tormenting within him, so that his thoughts emerged like the extreme visible tip of his innermost being, rather than a lifeless system of words, or a wordless feeling (VZT, 137; "YT," 170). He describes the double quality of his experience and connects it to the unconscious dimensions of his own inner life. He recognizes that the deeper dimensions, the something extra which allowed him to contextualize all of his experiences as simply contingent possibilities playing out against a background of unbounded chaos and infinite extension, emerged from within himself.  The meanings we see in things, the words which define the identities of self and other, come from us, and are contingent, "could be otherwise." This consciousness has two consequences. It allows him to see the other as simply another thing (either object or subject) in the world. Bozena and his mother, in the concluding scene, lose their terrorizing auras as embodiments of his unconscious sexuality. Driving past Bozena's house on the way to the railway station after deciding to leave the boarding school, he perceived it as "utterly insignificant and harmless" (so unbedeutend und harmlos) and turning toward his mother, who is sitting at his side, he thoughtfully "considered" (prüfte) the "faint scent of perfume that arose from her bodice" (den leise parfümierten Geruch, der aus der Taille seiner Mutter aufstieg [VZT, 140; "YT," 175]). At the same time, Törless's own self has become more like a project than an iron cage of imposed identities. Recognizing the source of his fantasies in the never fully articulated power of his unconscious sensual desire presents the possibility of a future in which his own self will remain an always surprising and never closed story of aesthetic and critical self-fashioning and refashioning.
The narrator of Young Törless participates with his subject in this process of self-fashioning and self-understanding. At the beginning of the novel the narrative voice is intrusive, authoritatively informing the reader of the later significance of particular events in his subject's life, constantly pointing to the ways in which Törless's confusions will be absorbed into a life understood as fashioning it's own self. By the end, the voice of the narrator and that of Törless are in virtual harmony as Törless learns to articulate himself in the words of the narrator. Törless himself is described as developing in later years into an "aesthetically inclined intellectual," who can tell the story recounted in the novel in terms of its exemplary significance as a story of the fashioning of a person who is able to take his own life as an object for critical understanding and aesthetic stylization (VZT, 111; "YT," 135). In this sense Musil's conception of the construction of self-identity goes a step further than that portrayed in the contemporaneous texts of Freud and Schnitzler. Unlike Dora or Dr. Schreber, Bermann or Wergenthin, Törless internalizes the narrator's perspective as his own.
In a sense the achievement of masculine identity in Musil's novel, as in Schnitzler's The Road into the Open and Freud's early case studies, involves a mastery and disciplined control of femininity. Törless's confusions arise from the release of his repressed femininity, from his surrender to the passive masochistic attraction of the ego-dissolving, boundary-effacing power of unconscious desire. But Törless's solution is not to disavow this femininity and project it on to the other, as is the case with Beineberg or Reiting. Instead he learns to accept it. It is the deepest, ultimately never fully comprehensible source of his own subjective power to make and remake his self within the context of existing possibilities in a world in which things "just happen." But it is also one pole of that bi-polar self for which a purified masculine or feminine identity could only mean a disavowal of the human project of making one's own self an object of critical examination and aesthetic work. Assuming a homogeneous masculine or feminine identity would entail a submission to the unrecognized and thus unmastered "other" within oneself.
Robert Musil was not Jewish, not Viennese, and a generation, or at least a half-generation younger than Freud and Schnitzler. His participation in the cultural conflicts of pre-war Austria and central Europe was certainly effected by the particular cultural perspectives and cultural baggage that he did not fully share with his older contemporaries. 43 Yet Törless does display a focused concentration on a number of dilemmas and themes which are mirrored in and shared by the contemporaneous texts of Schnitzler and Freud, and could be construed as tentatively mapping out a particular dimension of the "mind" of early modernism.
All of these texts take the ethical problem of autonomy as their object of diagnosis and experimental investigation, but construe and reformulate it as a problem of the construction of subjective identity rather than the emancipation of a natural or metaphysical essence. The generally recognized disintegration of conventional affirmations of centered, autonomous subjectivity--their unveiling as "illusions"--was interpreted as an opening to that dimension of psychic experience, the unconscious realm of psychosexual desire that precedes the formation of identities, rather than as a liberation of already preformed identities. Autonomy was first of all an ethical issue and defined as the task of achieving self-identity and self-mastery. This task was a practical, worldly, immanent task. For Freud, Schnitzler, and Musil, transendence did not mean escape into a realm of abstractions, pure forms, or timeless truths, but designated an inner-worldly process of the never-ending, open-ended work of self-construction.
As a contingent product that emerged from the shaping of undifferentiated or "bisexual" desire, the identity of the person, of "character", "soul", or "subjectivity", was portrayed as inextricably entangled in the processes of gender differentiation. From the standpoint of the individual's experience, gender difference was reimagined as an internal, psychic polarity. The articulation or enactment of masculine or feminine identity thus became an historical and ethical task, a process of self-fashioning within the limitations of natural and historical constraints. The articulation or enactment of masculine or feminine identity thus became a process of self-fashioning within the limitations of natural and historical constrants. In Musil, Schnitzler, and Freud, the ethical task of self-definition and self-mastery, despite all attempts to disassociate it from an inherent basis in male and female natures, in biological, metaphysical, or historical determinations of gender, remained bound to an idea of masculinity for which femininity remained either the enigmatic, preverbal, never fully graspable ground of all differentiated identities (the maternal ground of being), or the negative other of the universally human ideals of autonomy, self-mastery, and creative potency.
The conceptual language of science and its precise analytical distinctions, the experimentally controlled playing out of particular programs, hypotheses, and "ideal-typical" models were necessary tools for reconstructing the conditions and consequences of specific empirical determinations of identity within the real world in which the ethical task of self-fashioning was played out. The work of Freud, Schnitzler, and Musil evades any easy dichotomization of art and science. They achieved this symbiosis, however, by reconstructing both art and science within the terms of what I have defined as an essentially ethical task. Science became the tool of diagnostic critique, laying bare the conditions under which self-construction could occur. The psychologies of Musil, Schnitzler, and Freud were not so much sciences of the subject, as critical and self-reflexive accounts of the limits under which subjects were made. They thus recaptured the Enlightenment notion of a secular scientific perspective which did not provide a coherent representation of the world, but instead fueled a critical understanding of the ways in which representations of the world came into being. Art, in turn, was defined less by the tasks of constructing alternative worlds or identities than by the project of representing the processes through which such worlds and identities were constructed. As Musil noted in an interview with Oskar Fontana in 1926, his novels were to be interpreted as "contributions to the intellectual mastery of the world" in which "aesthetic qualities" were subordinate to the direction of the "will." 44
Finally, all three of these writers implicated the ethical tasks of manufacturing identity and constructing an autonomous self in the processes of writing coherent stories. In their works, narrative as a representation of existence did not collapse but was recreated in a new mode. The complex, reflexive process of narrative construction emerged as itself a meaningful and coherent story. The unifying "subject" of the narrative structure was reconstituted as the process of identity dissolution and identity construction, a process which involved not only the subjects in the text but the maker of the text as well. As stories of story makng, as meaningful accounts of the struggle to construct meaning, the texts of Freud, Schnitzler, and Musil appear as exemplary representations of the "mind" of early modernism.
John E. Toews is Professor of History and Chair of the Program in the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington. He is the author of Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and is currently completing a book on cultural politics in Berlin during the 1840s.
1. For a survey of the early Weininger reception see Jacques Le Rider, Der Fall Otto Weininger: Wurzeln des Antifeminismus und Antisemitismus (Vienna/Munich: Loecker Verlag, 1985), 220-242. This is an expanded and revised (and translated) version of a study originally published in French in 1982.
2. Aside from Le Rider's study, analysis of Weininger's impact on central European and Italian modernism is demonstrated in some detail in the anthology Otto Weininger: Werk und Wirkung, edited by Jacques Le Rider and Norbert Leser (Vienna: Oesterreichisches Bundesverlag, 1984), especially Parts I, II, and III, 71-105. See also Ursula Heckmann, Das Verfluchte Geschlecht: Motive der Philosophie Otto Weiningers im Werk Georg Trakls (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Gisela Brude-Firnau, "Wissenschaft von der Frau? Zum Einfluss von Otto Weininger's 'Geschlecht und Charakter' auf den deutschen Roman," in Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin: Neue Kritische Ansätze zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Berne: Francke verlag, 1979), 136-48, and Emile Delavenay, "D.H. Lawrence, Otto Weininger, and a Rather Raw Philosophy," in D. H. Lawrence: New Studies, edited by Christopher Heywood (Basingstoke: Hampshire, 1984).
3. I use the word "home" here and throughout to designate a conception of community in which individual identity is perceived as rooted in and integrated into social being. In the German tradition the term "Heimat" has developed strong connotations of nostalgic and utopian longing, which are also clearly present in my usage. Among my three authors only Schnitzler uses the term self-consciously.
4. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1980), 12; hereafter abbreviated GC. This is a reprint of the first edition of 1903. Translations are my own, but I have made use of an English translation of the sixth edition: Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London: William Heinemann, 1906), hereafter abbreviated SC. The original reads: ". . . es gibt keine kurzweg als ein-und bestimmt-geschlechtlich zu bezeichnenden Lebewesen.
5. Weininger dismissed the movement for women's emancipation as an attempt to emancipate femininity. He claimed to support attempts by individual women to become "masculine" (GC, 79-93). Similarly, Weininger despised as an excess of femininity in men what he perceived as effeminate homosexuality, but praised a type of Greek homoeroticism in which masculinity was attracted to masculinity in a process which promoted sexual renunication and spiritualization.
6. The original reads: "Man darf das Judentum nur für eine Geistesrichtung, für ein psychische Konstitution halten, welche für all Menschen eine Möglichkeit bildet, und im historischen Judentum bloß die grandioseste Verwirklichung gefunden hat.''
7. Overviews of the controversy about priority and plagiarism can be found in Peter Heller, "A Quarrel over Bisexuality," in Gerald Chapple and Hans H. Schulte, eds., The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890-1915 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), 87-115, and Le Rider, Der Fall Otto Weininger, 78-101.
8. Freud to Fliess, 23 July 1904, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 464.
9. Ibid., 450.
10. Hannelore Rodlauer, "Fragmente aus Weininger's Bildungsgeschichte," in her Otto Weininger, Eros und Psyche: Studien und Briefe, 1899-1902, ed. Hannelore Rodlauer (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 39, 41-2.
11. Freud, "Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung" , in Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 19 vols. (London: Imago, 1940-1947), vol. 10, 95-102. In English, "On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953--1974), vol. 14 1914-1916, 54-62. Hereafter this edition is abbreviated SE.
12. For a detailed presentation of the ways in which "Dora" can be read as a textual site for the fashioning of Freud's masculine identity see my, "Fashioning the Self in the Story of the 'Other': The Transformation of Freud's Masculine Identity between 'Elisabeth von R' and 'Dora,'" in Proof and Persuasion: Essays from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, ed. Elizabeth Lunbeck and Suzanne Marchand (Amsterdam: Brepols Press, forthcoming).
13. "Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse" (1905 [1901]), in Studienausgabe / Sigmund Freud, eds. Alexander Mitscherlich et al., vol. 6 Hysterie und Angst (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 132-3; hereafter this edition is abbreviated S/SF. "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," in SE, 7 , 59-60.
14. "Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährign Knaben" , S/SF, 8 Zwei Kinerneurosen, 36 note 1. "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" , SE, 10 , 36 note 1.
15. "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in S/SF, 7 Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion, 180; hereafter abbreviated as "PB." "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," SE, 12 (1911-1913), 55; hereafter abbreviated "PN."
16. The connection between the successful sublimation of infantile homoeroticism and the social interest or communal identification runs through the case studies of the prewar period, and finds its political conceptualization in the essays of Totem and Taboo of 1912-1913.
17. "Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci" , in S/SF, vol. 10 Bildende Kunst und Literatur, 156, 153; "Leondardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood," SE, 11 , 134, 131.
18. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Eva Brabant et al. and trans. Andre Haynal, vol. 1 1908-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 239-40. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire and tr. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 377; hereafter abbreviated F/J.
19. Freud had first used the term "narcissism" to account for homosexual object-choice in the second edition of his Three Essays on Sexuality . The Schreber case was the first text in which he specifically used the term to describe a stage of childhood development between auto-eroticism and object-love.
20. Freud to Ferenzci, 10 October 1910, Correspondence, 221. See also F/J, 199.
21. The original reads: "Libidobesetzungen und verleihen seinem Wahn eine auffällige Übereinstimmung mit unserer Theorie.  Ich kann aber das Zeugnis eines Freundes und Fachmannes dafür vorbringen, daß ich die Theorie der Paranoia entwickelt habe, ehe mir der Inhalt des Schreberschen Buches Bekannt war. Es bleibt die Zukunft überlassen zu entscheiden, ob in der Theorie mehr Wahn enthalten ist, als ich möchte, oder in dem Wahn mehr Wahrheit, als andere heute glaublich finden."
22. Freud's selective reading on these two issues has been pointed out by Jay Geller, "Freud vs. Freud: Freud's Readings of Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken," in Reading Freud's Reading, ed. Sander Gilman et al, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 180-210.
23. A good summary of the materials covering various aspects of the relationship, including a discussion of the first two quoted phrases, can be found in Michael Worbs, Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983), 179-258. Schnitzler's self-perception as Freud's twin is from an interview with George Viereck published in Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (London: Duckworth, 1930), 333.
24. Schnitzler tolerantly suffered through a rather schematic reading of his own work in Freudian categories in Theodor Reik's Arthur Schnitzler als Psycholog (Minden: J. C. C. Bruns, 1913).
25. Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch 1903-1908 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichschen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991), 177 (6 January 1906).
26. Ibid., 123 (25 February 1905), and 337 (6 June 1908).
27. See Michaela L. Perlmann, Der Traum in der literarischen Moderne: Zum Werk Arthur Schnitzlers (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), 133. There are also striking parallels in father/son relations.
28. Arthur Schnitzler, Der Weg ins Freie: Roman, vol. 4 of Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben; Das erzählerische Werk. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), 8; hereafter abbreviated WIF. Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open, trans. Roger Byers and with an introduction by Russell A. Berman (Berkeley: University of california Press, 1992), 4; hereafter abbreviated RIO. I have used the Byers translation as a basis for my own translations throughout.
29. The original reads: "Und wenn irgend eine, so war Anna dazu geschaffen, seinem Hang zur Verspieltheit und zur Nachlässigkeit entgegenzuwirken, ihn zu zielbewußter und erwerbbringender Tätigitkeit anzuhalten."
30.  Und nun klang das Wort plötzlich, als tönte etwas nie Gehörtes, nie Verstandenes, als schwängen geheimnisvoll singende Glocken in Zukunftsferneit.'"
31. The original reads: ". . . und doch geschaffen zu jedem Wahnsinn und jeder Seligkeit . . . der dunkle Glaz ihrer Augen, der blauschwarze Strom ihrer gelösten Haare, der Duft ihres bleichen, nackten Leibes."
32. The original reads: "Und es war ihm, wie in süßdumpfem Traum, als läge er, ein Knabe, zu seiner Mutter Füßen, und dieser Augenblick wäre schon Erinnerung, fern und schmerzlich, während er ihn durchlebte."
33.
34. One could see the fictional relationship between these two types of artists as Schnitzler's attempt to work through the dichotomy of modernist art constructed by his friend Hugo von Hoffmansthal in an essay published in 1893: "Today two things seem to be modern; the analysis of life and the flight from life. . . . One engages in the anatomy of one's own psychic life or one dreams. Reflection or fantasy, mirror-image or dream-image." (Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 Prosa [Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1956], 149).
35. The original reads: "'Aber lieber Freund, das Verstehn hilft ja gar nichts. Das Verstehen ist ein Sport wie ein anderer. Ein sehr vornehmer Sport und ein sehr kostspieliger. Man kann seine ganze Seele darauf verschwenden und als ein armer Teufel dastehen. Aber mit undern Gefühlen hat das Verstehen nicht das allergeringste zu tun--beinahe so wening wie mit unsern Handlungen. Es schützt uns nicht vor Leid, nicht vor Ekel, nicht vor Vernichtung. Es führt gar nirgends hin. Es ist eine Sackgasse gewissermaßen. Das Verstehen bedeutet immer ein Ende.'"
36. The original reads: "Wenigen, gar wenigen war die ungeheure, innere Bereitschaft gegeben, jede Erfahurung als neu und einzig zu empfinden--die Kraft es zu ertragen, daß in jedem Augenblick gleichsam in einer neuen Welt stünden. Und doch: nur dem, der den feigen Drang überwinde, alle Erlebnisse in Worte einzuengen, dem zeige das Leben--das vielfältig-eine, das wunderbare, sich in seiner wahren Gestalt."
37. Robert Musil, "Über Robert Musils Buecher" , in Robert Musil, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden, ed. Adolf Frise (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), 776; in English "On Robert Musil's Books," in Robert Musil: Precision and Soul, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 26. A description of the biographical materials reworked in the novel can be found in Uwe Bauer, "Zeit und gesellschaftskritik in Robert Musils 'Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß," in Vom 'Toerless' zum 'Mann ohne Eigenschaften'; Musil-Studien IV, ed. Uwe Bauer and Dietmar Goltschnigg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,1973), 19-45.
38. Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 13-14.  My translations, here and subsequently, often depart from but are constructed in consultation with the standard translation by Eithne Wilkens and Ernst Kaiser, "Young Törless," now most readily available in Robert Musil: Selected Writings, ed. Burton Pike (New York: Continuum, 1995), 1-175; here 10.
39. The original reads: "als einen steinernen Zwang, der sein ganzes Leben in diese Bewegung--Schritt für Schritt--auf dieser einen Linie, auf diesem einen schmalen Streifen, der sich durch den Staub zog, einfing und zusammenpreßte."
40. Musil's description of unconscious and conscious dimensions of psychic structure and the role of sexual desire in articulating this structure has provoked an extensive literature on both the possible influence of Freud on Musil and on analogies between Freudian theories and Musilian constructs. My own focus on problems of identity formation involving the relationship between masculinity, autonomy, and narration is not, as far as I know, discussed in this literature. A summary of the debate and a discussion of Musil's constructions of sexual desire from the Lacanian perspective can be found in Andrew Webber, "Sense and Sensuality in Musil's Toerless," German Life and Letters 41 : 106-30.
41. The original reads: ". . . etwas von fürchterlicher, tierischer Sinnlichkeit, das ihn wie mit Krallen packe und von den Augen aus zerreiße."
42. Freud's judgments on the heresies of Adler and Jung are contained in the last section of his "Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung", 84-123. Musil later saw his construction of cultural types of Beineberg and Reiting as prophetic anticipations of the political mass leaders of the 1920s and 1930s.
43. A masterful analysis of the historical conditions of Musil's intellectual project can be found in David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
44. Tagebücher, 788.
.
We all to-day (possibly with a coldness reminiscent of the insect-world) are in each other's vitals--overlap, intersect, and are Siamese to any extent. . . . The actual human body becomes of less importance every day.
--Wyndham Lewis
Even better than the real thing.
--U2
The fascist body is a forgery. That is, it is wholly constructed, meant for circulation, and stands in for a previous incarnation, the völkish body, that of the people. The fascist body is fabricated, renovated, reconstructed, consisting of extensions and projections. It is frequently said that all bodies are constructs, but there's an original sort of forgery at work in the fascist body, because it's a forgery of a forgery, a stand-in for a prototype that never existed, the double of a fake. I will anatomize the body presented in two texts written by Wyndham Lewis, Hitler and Snooty Baronet . In order to do this, I must take two things for granted, neither of which is true. The first is that there is a fascist aesthetic, and the second is that Wyndham Lewis labored under it. I would like to propose that we collaborate with such dreams of coherence and necessity, that we strap them on artificially in the name of building a better understanding of a particular strain of literary modernism.
My account of the fascism-modernism nexus is based on a belief that some writers were indeed articulating artistic structures that served the ideological interests of particular social groups. Whereas I can agree with Robert Casillo that these structures sometimes evince pathology, I want to track the aesthetic at work in the artistic structures articulated by Lewis and to argue for a coherence of perspective that does not reduce to either the ideological or the pathological. 1 I will use prosthesis as a way to articulate a form of embodiment that encompasses but is not limited to the collaboration between modernism and fascism. From my vantage point on these two terms, prosthesis is central to an alternative strain of modernism in which character, identity, narrative-functions, and the bodies that move through these modernist fictions are constituted so that embodiment can be dissembled, reworked, reproduced, and rendered either unintelligible or unmotivated. 2 My contention is that our most authoritative "genealogy of modernism" is incomplete, and that there is a competing line of descent that has everything to do with bodies, ossature, and carapace, and little to do with psychology, motivation, or desire. 3 I will refer to prosthesis as a way to understand--and not just to supplement--the body in two texts written by two writers, Lewis and, briefly, Ernst Jünger, both of whom have uneasy relationships to fascism, specifically to National Socialism, and to modernism. 4
In 1930 Lewis went to Berlin in order to write about the rise of National Socialism. During this last gasp of the Weimar Republic, Lewis wrote what came to be Hitler. He returned to England and two years later, in 1932, published the novel Snooty Baronet.
Ernst Jünger, who is one hundred and two this year, fought in both world wars and received numerous decorations as well as literary acclaim for his "Front-experience" book, The Storm of Steel. "Total Mobilization," the essay with which I want to supplement Lewis's textual world, appeared in an anthology called War and Warrior that Jünger himself edited in 1930. "Total Mobilization" is a précis of The Worker, published the same year as Snooty Baronet, 1932. Jünger looks to a future in which the individual is ennobled by a ferocious relationship to labor, entirely integrated into the landscape of a society for which mobilization is both means and end.
Lewis's novel concerns a one-legged and extremely snooty baronet who writes scientific treatises on People Behaving, which is the title of his first popular book. He calls these books "behaviorist" tracts; they are a snooty science, artfully rendered (or so his loathed public decides). Snooty wants to study "Man upon exactly the same footing as ape or insect" (SB, 64) and writes two books that come to be acclaimed, much to the author's chagrin, as "Works of Art" (SB, 65), rather than as science. Snooty is recruited by his literary agent, Humph, to go to Persia on a publicity stunt: ostensibly to study the cult of Mithras, but really to be kidnapped by native brigands, and then heavily ransomed. The point is to provide Snooty with publicity. Snooty cooperates, reluctantly, and takes with him the woman he loves to loathe, Val, who is immensely unattractive, but at the moment rich. He hopes to set up Humph, whom he also loves to loathe, with Val, and is disappointed when it turns out that Humph already hates Val. Eventually Snoots and Val go on to Persia, where they meet up with Humph, and set to loathing each other in new ways. The fake kidnapping commences and, because this is a Lewis novel, Snooty suddenly shoots his literary agent twice in the back, killing him. Snooty ultimately returns to England, where he becomes famous because of the kidnapping, and writes the book that we now read, Snooty Baronet, in order to clear his name--that is, to prove that he knew exactly what he was doing when he shot Humph dead. He does not regret his action in the least.
Michael Levenson has written about what he calls the condition of "transitivity" in Lewis's novel Tarr, where any one character can assume another's characteristics. Lewis's concept of character is even more radical than that; transitivity is simply a symptom of having artificially to extend one's self. Attendant upon this dynamic is a routine dislocation of character, moments when character becomes unhinged, when the most literal aspects of "integrity"--and by this I mean bodily wholeness as well as rectitude--not so much dissolve, for there is no mush in Lewis, as unfasten. 5 This process is literalized in Snooty Baronet, where the protagonist first appears as a stranger to itself. "Not a bad face," begins the novel, "flat and white, broad and weighty." (SB, 15) And then, "The face drew back. The door opened.  Pointing the rigid leg downward, implacably on the sidewalk, the big man swung outward, until the leg hit terra-firma. . . . The face was mine." (SB, 15) And the leg is his. Or is it? We are called back to the moment of the double, of Sigmund Freud encountering his own face in the train compartment: "I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door." 6 This is the uncanny, the site of confusion between the organic and the inorganic, the unsettling moment when the animated is inorganic, when the leg is as foreign to Snooty's body as it is its essence. Indeed by the end of the novel, Snooty will be countering accusations that he is "unhinged (that is the expression, as if I were a door)" (SB, 252). Freud mistaking himself for a door, or vice versa, is the mirror image of what is in fact the case for Snooty: he is unhinged.
The European Unhinged underwent a great deal of reworking in the twenty years before the appearance of Snooty Baronet, the years during and following World War I. The war created "a new constituency of disabled people." 7 Bodies were mutilated at a new rate and in novel ways, while psychological trauma was brought to a new level of visibility. More than 41,000 British men had limbs amputated after sustaining new kinds of wounds. The new frequency and forms of mutilation were due both to new weaponry like hand grenades, high explosive shells, pointed bullets, and artillery fire, and to particular conditions of warfare--mud, lice--that encouraged infection. Given the numbers of the wounded requiring treatment simultaneously, "within three days of a battle, a casualty clearing station might be swamped with 1,000 injured men and mutilated limbs sometimes had to wait days before being amputated." (DM, 34) The smell at these clearing stations was much remarked upon; the gas that gangrene produces smells sweet, or "mouse-like," 8 and in a world before penicillin, the smell of the infected and decaying flesh was overpowering. In addition to the new visible effects of war on the body, there was a new less immediately recognizable consequence for the soldier's body: in 1916, 40 percent of combat zone casualties were due to shell-shock. Overall, neurasthenia was responsible for one-third of the discharges from the British army (DM, 109). The debate over the cause of psychological ill-health initially inclined toward the organic, but over the course of the war, shell-shock was viewed as stemming from psychological causes.
All of this had the combined effect of introducing a segment of the population that had never before been so populous, so visible, and so altered; following World War I, the population of Britain was left to integrate a huge population of amputees and shell-shock victims. 9 The effects were felt from art to orthopedics. While industry accounted for a certain level of mutilation within Britain, and birth defects too accounted for many missing limbs, these segments of the population were either working-class or, in the case of children, unenfranchised. The war fed into society a tremendous number of men with class standing, full citizen status, and even some social distinction, initially conferred by their wounds; a transfer of the resources garnered during the war resulted: the "gigantic plant . . . to help the disabled," the "army of people whose livelihood was dependent on maintaining a supply of cripples" (DM, 51), was redirected toward the general population. 10 The industry for production and distribution of artificial limbs was radically altered. The limbs were hard to come by; in 1919, a wooden artificial limb cost anywhere from £15 (for arm amputations above the elbow) to £22 (for an amputation through the hip joint), while the average wage for a skilled craftsman was £2 a week (DM, 45). An artificial limb made of aluminum alloy, which was lighter and thus preferable, cost £80 during the same period. By 1922, however, after the British government agreed to examine the relative benefits and costs of wooden versus metal limbs, a government committee concluded that, given the relative lifetimes and maintenance costs of each item, the metal limb was more cost-effective and thus superior. While a wooden limb's lifetime was four years and cost £120 every twelve years, a metal limb lasted six to eight years and cost only £96 every twelve years (DM, 46). In consultation with the government the producers of artificial limbs agreed to lower the cost of their product and the metal limbs were increasingly distributed to ex-servicemen. 11
My argument is this: the prosthetic body, that is, the body once fragmented, now made new with supplemental forms of prosthesis, is more than the sum of its parts; the soldierly body went through a transformation from a historical, wounded body into a nonhistorical, aestheticised body. This new body, the prosthetic body, succeeds where the previous body failed. My claim is that the prosthetic body is uniquely modern, has functioned in a way that counteracts the absorptive tendencies of cultural transmission, and, finally, that it is an index to a cold modernism.
In the beginning was the "mere body," prewar, cloaked only in flesh, retroactively understood as fragile. 12 This is the "tiny, fragile human body" Walter Benjamin describes suddenly finding itself in the middle of the battlefield of World War I, but it is that body before discovering itself in that alien landscape. 13 The second position, that of the armored body, is the soldier at war. The prosthetic body is the third position in a genealogy of body-positions available before, during, and after World War I. The prosthetic body is as historical as the mud in the trenches of the Somme. Certainly prosthesis is not a modern invention, but it is in an important sense the apotheosis of modernity, a fantasy about the modern body beyond the merely compensatory. But the prosthetic body, the mere body after war plus prosthesis, is not reworked into another element at all; it emerges first as historical symbol, then is stripped naked, or as close to naked as the armored body can be, and reborn as an exemplary instance of the new man, the modern body, and a body of literature. The prosthetic body is a product of historical circumstances, but it embodies an ahistorical promise, making available a new and quintessentially modern image. As an embodiment of the uncanny, resting on the seam between organic and inorganic, between flesh and metal, it literalizes an aspect of the relationship between war and art, or history and culture, that preserves its original contours as much as it gestures toward its dissolution. The prosthetic body is balanced on the edge between the pleasure principle and the death drive, a product of trauma built on the promise of repetition. While prosthesis first emblematized, even as it sought to resolve, a trauma that had fragmented the body, it came to operate as a culture's fantasy of proof that the body not only survived, but had been born better.
Any artistic movement is bound to absorb, with varying measures of intention and wit, the culture that surrounds it. Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring gives us an image of dada dancers juxtaposed with an "armored lookout man" from World War I; his point is to show that dada took a particular kind of historical body and incorporated it into its own aesthetic. 14 Eksteins sketches the profound transformations that World War I had on the history and art that followed; it was the "event," and what ensued--dada, Charles Lindbergh, shingled hair, World War II--was the "consequence" (RS, xvi). Mud speaks: Eksteins argues that the landscape of battle was in essence avant-garde avant la lettre: "The whole landscape of the Western Front became surrealistic before the term surrealism was invented by the soldier-poet Guillaume Apollinaire. . . . A panorama of devastation confronted the soldiers in the major battle zones" (RS, 146). The mud that the soldiers struggled through and died in, "a kind of stagnant river, too thick to flow, yet too wet to stand," which "you left no tracks in . . . they all closed over, and you went in over your boots at every step and sometimes up to your calves," 15 was transformed by the war experience into a feature of modern life. Eksteins quotes T. S. Eliot:
. . . Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. 16
Eksteins concludes, "It was as if words had become like the mud on the Somme." (RS, 218) Prosthesis too speaks as both context and formulating principle, but while mud became a symbol of culture's quagmire, prosthesis emerged in culture formulated, retroactively, as a unifying principle for the modern body.
The question of what appendages engage directly with the speaker in Snooty Baronet, whether things in fact are or are not Snooty, is a recurrent issue. The prosthetic device of his leg is lavished with a measure of syntactical care that no other object in the novel receives--and I number characters among those objects. 17 The leg is called variously "my mechanical knee" (SB, 44, 76), "fitted with clockwork" (SB, 22), and "a nickel nether limb" (SB, 22). Snooty's prosthetic device is most certainly his (but perhaps only because no one else wants it); it is most his when he unfastens it, and later has to hop around looking for it; this usually happens before and after sex, which not surprisingly, since this is a Lewis novel, is supplemented by an explicitly unpleasant return to the organic: Snooty's character is augmented not only by a nickel nether limb, but by a silver plate in his head, which embedded itself during the war, and this plate has the effect of making Snooty retch following sexual climax. The first time we see this, Snooty's character is again dislocated by a return to the third person. Ten minutes after hopping into bed with Val, "a one-legged man hopped out. He was as naked as God ushered him into the world. . . . Sitting down . . . and bending over the gilt-flowered slop-vessel, this man proceeded to be ill. . . . That one-legged man . . . was me." (SB, 49) Engagement is awarded only to the leg--it is the only thing that truly engages Snooty; he is forever interposing his mechanical leg between the fleshier parts of his body and those of his paramours. This has the effect of rendering mechanical even those fleshier bits:
As I spoke I went to meet her--as I started my mechanical leg giving out an ominous creak (I had omitted to oil it, like watches and clocks these things require lubrication). I seized her stiffly round the body. All of her still passably lissom person . . . gave. It was the human willow, more or less. It fled into the hard argument of my muscular pressures. Her waist broke off and vanished into me as I took her over in waspish segments, an upper and a nether. . . . With my live leg . . . I attacked the nether half of my aggressive adversary, and wound it cleverly round her reintegrating fork. (We were now both suspended upon my mechanical limb.) [SB, 48]
This bachelor comes already hitched. At first it would appear simply that his body subsumes hers--the latter "flees" the former; he disarticulates her, literally, breaking apart her "segments." The segment of most interest to Snooty is the "nether half," the lower region, which is also the trickiest, requiring some level of cleverness in dealing with its containment. This is the half that inspires in him the role of the "adversary": at that point--the point on the body, the point in the sentence--the moment of contest is clearly articulated. Val's body moves from being fluid, "passably lissom," to being armored, at first in response to Snooty's own "hard argument" but then in relation to her own bodily construction: she is divided into "waspish segments." Val's body, then, comes to echo Snooty's, articulated as it is in differing registers: she, lissome, then waspish and aggressive, he stiff, then wending and suspended. The blur of who is what--both seem at once mechanical and fleshy, bipedal and pseudopodial--is paralleled by Lewis's organization of units of time, and action: bodies can flee without moving, and in fact here Val flees and vanishes precisely insofar as she does not move; while integration ("her reintegrating fork") is staged on a stilled body's petiole. The moment of integration--again both topographically and syntactically--signals the moment of the battle's climax, which finds both Val and Snooty "suspended" atop the latter's leg.
Being disengaged from one's body parts, one's name, and one's own character are repeated signs of disorientation. Many people end up being "snooty," with a lowercase S, throughout the novel (Humph, for instance, so antagonizes Val at one point that "He really became Snooty"--note the capital S [SB, 205].). There's no sense of a character's stability; Snooty Baronet is peopled with duplications, or at least pale copies. The plot grinds out two prostitutes named Lily, one from London, and one of the Eastern variety, "whose name was Lily in Persian," Shushani (SB, 220). 18 Character is not only "transitive"; it is contagious, with the result that entire characters are reproducible, courtesy of something like a character machine.
And as reproducible as character is, what it lacks is integrity--that is, what might be conceived of as psychological intactness, a density of thought and insight--pith. Snooty himself is aware of this odd lack, aware that he does not quite get things; that ideas have no resonance for him. He explains the odd look his face sometimes has, a "heavy puzzled look" (SB, 134).
I have literally to drill holes in this sheep's head of mine before it can get an at all difficult notion, or sometimes any at all, into it properly. In all but purely mechanical things, of an external order . . . I am a profoundly dense person, I can hardly help it. Mine is anything but a quick mind.--This may be why I am a behaviorist. . . . A notion goes so far in with me and not an inch farther. That is what is oddest of all. It seems to stick in the surface shell. It remains embedded in the bone, quite hard and fast. . . . Ideas come out of the blue, fiercely to get us, like wasps, or like a bacillus or a weevil dropped on a cork. I can feel one strike me. Then I feel it get stuck . . . [SB, 134].
This is a wonderful description of what being a bonehead, literally, feels like, if the word "feels" can be used here. Ideas, like wasps--this is the blooming, buzzing confusion of reality (and remember those "waspish segments" [SB, 48] of Val's buzzing body). But for Lewis, as not for a Virginia Woolf character, one's access to interiority is wholly impoverished; nothing quite penetrates the ossature that surrounds us.
Engagement with one's environment, however, has a nasty habit of slipping in, and this makes the speaking subject-positions in Lewis so slippery. Isolationism constantly needs to be reconstructed and reiterated; the banquet that the narrator hosts for his puppets is repeatedly disrupted because these dead things keep aiming their faces in our direction, and it looks as if they are looking at us. You--the author--have a habit of answering back, knowing all the while that there is no one else in the room. It's just you and wood. But the conviction in your own voice, that these things are so very dead, works to animate you, and comes to animate them. Your animus animates them. At one point in the novel Snooty stands transfixed by an automaton in the window of a haberdasher, a machine in the shape of a man who tips his hat to the public.
His character interested me at once. It is absurd to say these things (if you insist on calling them things) have no character. Those that are made to-day are, like characters in books, often much more real than live people. . . . It was impossible as one watched him not to feel that he was in some real sense alive. At certain moments of course the imperfections of the apparatus would betray him. But is this not the case . . . with the best of us? [SB, 133]
This is as close to a cri de cur as Lewis gives, and who wants anything more plaintive, except some people who really like dinner parties, who actually believe that other people are listening to them?
Snooty gives what he reluctantly calls his own behaviorist "cry from the heart" (SB, 252) on the novel's final page when he demands justice, which is to say he argues for continuity in his behavior and continuity in our understanding of his behavior: he is not, he protests, to be misunderstood or "whitewashed" by Val as simply a "dirty dog" (SB, 252). His behavior, Snooty means, is consistently without internal motivation, or consistently habitual. The cable that Val sends him, accusing him of being "a dirty dog," is what Snooty calls "snooty" (SB, 252); the nightmare of behaviorism, then, is that behavior is infinitely iterable. If all actions are generated by a human motor (more of this below)--if there's no pressure to be individually motivated, or unique--then an essentially Fordist notion lies at the heart of humanity, which means we can all be built, and indeed we are all built alike, which in turn (in this assembly-line logic) means that what I do you can be, and so Val becomes snooty. Or, more formally, as Snooty says in the novel's penultimate line, "If you are a true behaviorist . . . you behave as I have behaved!" (SB, 252) The dynamic of this discourse separates Snooty from his own situation: first, because by virtue of the behaviorist theorem no narrative position is unique--you can't argue for the importance of Bloom's day as it occurs to Bloom since, according to behaviorism, you or I (you and I) will react in exactly the same way, given the same circumstances. Second, Snooty articulates (in the sense of enunciating the joints of an object/argument so distinctly that they are readily divisible) himself out of what might crudely be called the subject-position. In articulating his position as a true behaviorist, he divides himself from the behaviorist position, since given the behaviorist position there's nothing essential about being present to an occasion (Val might as well be Snooty and in fact is). Snooty thus ends by addressing an antagonistic audience comprised of behaviorists, a roomful of snooty replications: "Put that in your pipe and smoke it, all you professors of this implacable doctrine!" (SB, 252).
It's important that Snooty's last line is a parting shot, in a novel of parting shots, because it enacts what Lewis's syntax insists on, that we are all angrily and loudly leaving a room filled with people who are unaware of our having entered it, because we bear an eerie resemblance to the other partygoers. The syntax loudly declares its difference from received opinion, the belief that we are all unique.
Lewis's syntax is wonderfully obdurate, and its hard-as-nails quality replicates the structure of the bodies in his fictions. His syntactical ossature works toward a form-echoes-function maintenance of indifference and stasis; for instance, in response to Humph's initial proposal to travel to Persia to learn about the cult of the bull, Snooty makes "a rather violent gesture of deprecation--to superadd to utter ignorance desire for continuance of same." (SB, 75) This is the literary incarnation--with the syntax enacting the obdurate quality it describes--of the fin-de-siècle nexus of over-stimulation, nervous exhaustion, stasis, and modernity, all of which Freud drew on when he likened the ego to a single-celled organism, constructed with a thick layer with which to deflect nervous shock. The combination of violence and stasis, an abstruse syntax evoking at once the asceticism of science ("desire for continuance of same," with its three-fold elision of articles), and a mannered affectedness (not repeating "ignorance," instead substituting "the same" as if one were too weary even of ignorance to sully one's diction with it twice) is familiar--this syntax puts the "duh" in "fin de siècle." Anyone who has read Max Nordau's wildly stimulating book Degeneration will recognize the symptom of nervous excitement--because of wars, because of cities--as indicative of the disease of modernity, with all its concomitant pathologies. Georg Simmel too saw humans as guarding against and shaped by the city; urbanity is the source of a particular kind of degenerative effect, producing a new form of personality, one driven by an increased "intellectualistic quality." 19 In "The Metropolis and Mental Life" he says that "the metropolitan type . . . creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it" ("ML," 326). This increased intellectualism is, then, a psychic buffer, one akin to what Freud described in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Simmel's city--Berlin--produces a community of individuals who have in common "a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality" ("ML," 326). This "increased intellectualism" is paired with what Simmel calls the "blasé attitude" ("ML," 329); both are the result of a submersion in an overstimulating environment, and both are at once compensatory and formative.
Just as an immoderately sensuous life makes one blasé because it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until they finally can no longer produce any reaction at all, so, less harmful stimuli, through the rapidity and the contradictoriness of their shifts, force the nerves to make such violent responses, tear them about so brutally that they exhaust their last reserves of strength and, remaining in the same milieu, do not have time for new reserves to form. ["ML," 329]
This blasé attitude is coupled with, Simmel says, the tendency to experience one's environment in terms of equivalencies, while "distinctions between things . . . are experienced as meaningless" ("ML," 330).
Both of these propensities, the blasé attitude and the calculus of similitude, Simmel attributes to the effect of money on the metropolitan economy. "Money economy and the domination of the intellect stand in the closest relationship to one another. They have in common a purely matter-of-fact attitude in the treatment of persons and things in which a formal justice is often combined with unrelenting hardness." ("ML," 326) "Unrelenting hardness" is of course the result of seeing things in terms of their exchange value, rather than their meaning.
[E]xchange value . . . reduces all quality and individuality to a purely quantitative level. All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is, as with elements . . . which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable. ["ML," 326]
Qualitative discrimination interrupts the flow of pure exchange, forcing the subject into making an evaluative judgment for which he isn't neurologically equipped; the metropolitan citizen is incapable of "react[ing] to new stimulations with the required amount of energy" ("ML," 329). He becomes, in other words, snooty:
Indeed . . . the inner side of this external reserve is not only indifference but more frequently than we believe, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion which, in a close contact . . . can break out into hatred and conflict. . . . Our minds respond, with some definite feeling, to almost every impression emanating from another person. The unconsciousness, the transitoriness and the shift of these feelings seem to raise them only into indifference. Actually this latter would be as unnatural to us as immersion into a chaos of unwished-for suggestions would be unbearable. From these two dangers of metropolitan life we are saved by antipathy which is the latent adumbration of actual antagonism since it brings about the sort of distantiation and deflection without which this type of life could not be carried on at all. ["ML," 331]
Antipathy saves us from languishing wholly in the blasé and its opposite, a chaotic welter of absolute empathy. Simmel takes the characteristics with which Lewis fashions Snooty--the blasé attitude, an "unrelenting hardness," and a literal investment in antipathy--and produces a type; Lewis produces a novel. This is not to say that Lewis read Simmel. The novel absorbs the monetary structure to which Simmel refers, making Snooty a baronet with limited financial resources, a writer who banks on aversion as the basis of his career. Money is an important sign in Lewis, both of biographical predicaments (the author never had it), and of a structure for narrative relations. It is the gold standard of modern relations--a smoothly functioning system erected on, and producing, aversion and indifference.
Snooty is chronically blasé. He yawns constantly--he is forever bored, even by death--and we may look to his hearty gasps of boredom as a key to his quintessentially modern ailment. Snooty is modern man: ex-soldier, part clockwork, partly running down, but nonetheless wholly functional, wholly productive; he is fully a member of the money economy. Snooty is in fact one of the few artists in early Lewis fiction who produce anything--Tarr has great descriptions of the artists who receive visitors rather than work. 20 Lewis's artists tend to be anything but transitive. Anson Rabinbach traces a compelling supplement to the genealogy of neurasthenia and fatigue, with fatigue being not a detriment to civilization, as Nordau and others have it, but on the contrary a reason for its success: theorists of the fin-de-siècle postulated that fatigue was a way to ensure overall productivity, avoiding wasted energy. Fatigue was seen as one of the mechanisms of an inner clock that regulates what Rabinbach calls "the human motor." 21
"Spirit" ["Geist"] has often justifiably reveled in contempt for the wooden marionettes of progress; but the fine threads that produce their movements are invisible.
--Ernst Jünger, "Total Mobilization" 22
With labor as our hinge, let's pivot here to Jünger's "Total Mobilization." In the quotation above, Jünger looks to the investigation of what lies behind progress; he wants to determine what animates the puppets of history. This concept of progress bears further dissection, and, having emerged from the War To End All Wars, Jünger decides that the place to conduct the analysis is the battlefield. "Mobilization" is the process by which a society gears itself up to t a battle. General mobilization, when enlisted subjects are recruited and sent into battle, has now, Jünger says, "the character of a partial measure." ("TM," 125). To embrace true progress, to realize politics as "the art of the possible" ("TM," 126)--Jünger here quotes Bismarck--and completely reevaluate the basis of an economy, Jünger envisions a process of mobilization that is temporally and philosophically all-encompassing:
the image of war as armed combat merges into the more extended image of a gigantic labor process [Arbeitprozesses]. . . . [T]here is no longer any movement whatsoever--be it that of the homeworker at her sewing machine--without at least indirect use for the battlefield. In this unlimited marshalling of potential energies, which transforms the warring industrial countries into volcanic forges, we perhaps find the most striking sign of the dawn of the age of labor [Arbeitszeitalter]. ["TM," 126]